The reply is a smaller scope, in one sentence

There is exactly one reply to "can you do it cheaper" that leaves your rate card intact: yes, at a smaller scope, here it is. Anything else is either a refusal that loses a booking you could have had, or a discount that converts your published price into an opening bid.

The distinction that matters is between cutting the price of the work and changing which work is being priced.

Why the same work at a lower price is expensive

A discount on identical work tells the buyer the real price was lower all along. That is not a moral point, it is an arithmetic one: the next time they book, the discounted number is the number they remember, and getting back to your listed price is now a rise you have to justify rather than a price you have to state.

It also travels. Buyers in a small market talk, and the discount you gave once becomes a thing people ask for by name. Price is also part of how the work is experienced: in Plassmann and colleagues' 2008 study, raising the stated price of a wine increased tasters' reported pleasantness.

The version that does not cost you anything is a lower tier that genuinely contains less: fewer axes, shorter runtime, longer turnaround, no recorded component. The buyer gets a real choice, the card holds, and you have learned something about what they actually wanted.

The one-sentence forms

"I can do a shorter version at X, which covers the three main axes rather than all eight." "At that budget I would drop the recorded part and keep the written assessment - that is X." "I could do it at X if the deadline moves to next week."

Each names a price and names what comes off. None of them apologises, and none of them asks a question, because a question invites a counter-offer.

If nothing can come off - the job has a floor below which it is not worth doing - then the sentence is: "X is the lowest version of this I offer, and I would rather be straight with you than deliver something thin." Then stop typing. The most common way this conversation is lost is the earner writing a fourth sentence.

Why explaining your costs never works

The instinct is to justify: platform fees, the hours it takes, the equipment. It does not persuade, and it makes things worse in two directions.

A buyer is not evaluating your costs, they are evaluating whether the thing is worth that much to them. Your costs are irrelevant to that question, and raising them invites the buyer to dispute them - to explain that it surely does not take you that long, which is a conversation with no good ending.

It also reframes you as someone recovering expenses rather than selling judgement. The buyer-side account of how a commission normally opens is notable for how little of it is about price at all; buyers are mostly worried about being ignored or receiving something generic.

Price justification also runs into an unwinnable comparison. Generic output is free and instant now, and the tools that produce it are what a price-sensitive buyer has usually already tried. You cannot win on cost against something with no marginal cost, which is why the answer is scope rather than arithmetic. Where the product genuinely is precision, the conventions that make a figure comparable are worth naming - but that is a description of what the buyer gets, not a defence of what it costs you.

Have the smaller tier written down before anybody asks. A rate card built to survive questioning already contains the answer, and the wider discounting problem is mostly the problem of improvising one under pressure. On a platform with fixed tier slots, the smaller version has to be listed to exist at all, which is a good reason to build it into your listing rather than keep it in your head.